UNIT I Overview of CLOUD COMPUTING

What is Cloud:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared
pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and
services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five
essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the Internet. Cloud services allow
individuals and businesses to use software and hardware that are managed by third parties at
remote locations. Examples of cloud services include online file storage, social networking sites,
webmail, and online business applications. The cloud computing model allows access to
information and computer resources from anywhere that a network connection is available.
Cloud computing provides a shared pool of resources, including data storage space, networks,
computer processing power, and specialized corporate and user applications.

Essential characteristics of Cloud Computing:

- On demand self services: computer services such as email, applications, network or server
service can be provided without requiring human interaction with each service provider. Cloud
service providers providing on demand self services include Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Microsoft, Google, IBM and Salesforce.com. New York Times and NASDAQ are examples of
companies using AWS (NIST). Gartner describes this characteristic as service based

- Broad network access: Cloud Capabilities are available over the network and accessed
through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms
such as mobile phones, laptops and PDAs.

- Resource pooling: The provider’s computing resources are pooled together to serve multiple
consumers using multiple-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources
dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. The resources include
among others storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, virtual machines and email
services. The pooling together of the resource builds economies of scale (Gartner).

- Rapid elasticity: Cloud services can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases
automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the
capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any
quantity at any time.

- Measured service: Cloud computing resource usage can be measured, controlled, and reported
providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilised service. Cloud
computing services use a metering capability which enables to control and optimize resource use.
This implies that just like air time, electricity or municipality water IT services are charged per

1
usage metrics – pay per use. The more you utilise the higher the bill. Just as utility companies
sell power to subscribers, and telephone companies sell voice and data services, IT services such
as network security management, data center hosting or even departmental billing can now be
easily delivered as a contractual service.

- Multi Tenacity: is the 6th characteristics of cloud computing advocated by the Cloud Security
Alliance. It refers to the need for policy-driven enforcement, segmentation, isolation,
governance, service levels, and chargeback/billing models for different consumer constituencies.
Consumers might utilize a public cloud provider’s service offerings or actually be from the same
organization, such as different business units rather than distinct organizational entities, but
would still share infrastructure.

How Clouds are changing:

16 Ways The Cloud Will Change Our Lives

“Cloud computing has the potential to generate a series of disruptions that will ripple out from
the tech industry and ultimately transform many industries around the world,” says John Hagel,
co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, Deloitte’s Silicon Valley-based research center.
Here are some of the ways the cloud’s ability to access, analyze, store and share information
could change our business and personal lives:

Everyone will become a gamer.

Gaming is called the “killer app” of cloud computing, and gamers have salivated over demos
with complex 3-D graphics delivered to mobile devices through the cloud. While some technical
wrinkles remain, players can now enjoy breathtaking gaming experiences anywhere because of
the cloud’s power to provide higher speed without interruption. The same gaming principles are
now being extended to many other areas. “You can deliver information to a patient about using a
drug in a way that is as compelling to use as any game or app,” says Lynette Ferrara, a partner at
the IT consultancy CSC. The new generation of wellness and chronic disease management
programs use gaming techniques to educate and coach patients in real time. “We expect that
information will be available at our fingertips, and the cloud will change the nature of the kind of
information we can access.” Ferrara adds, “In essence, we will all become gamers, with this
functionality being used for everything from product development to personalized medication
and disease management programs.”

Fixing stuff will be easier.

Thanks to the cloud, you can expect to get earlier notice when things around your house or office
are about to go on the fritz. For example, a cloud-based app alerts drivers of electric cars when
their batteries will run out of juice, letting them get to a charging station without needing to call a
tow truck. A major medical equipment company developed a cloud-based application that feeds
information to field system engineers who need to maintain health equipment, helping them head
off problems. And when stuff needs to be fixed, the cloud will make that easier, too. Daniel

2
Burrus, author of Flash Foresight, says tablet PCs using cloud-based applications will give field
technicians immediate access to training modules if they need to, say, figure out how to repair a
certain type of furnace. “There will be a wave of just-in-time training,” Burrus says.

Computers will become invisible.

When people use search engines, they usually don’t realize they are accessing billion-dollar
computer networks. As the power of the cloud spreads, one effect will be to make software and
computing more invisible, says Dan Reed, vice president of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing
Group. Your interaction with computers will be more hands free—such as the recent introduction
of the Kinect, which allows gamers to eschew controllers and just use gestures and movements
that are interpreted by a 3-D camera and infrared detection system. Expect to see more of this
type of computer intuition because of the cloud. “You will be able to walk in a room and there
could be hundreds of sensors in it that could respond,” Reed says.

You’ll actually find what you want in stores.

Surveys show a large number of consumers are dissatisfied with the growing practice of web-to-
store—where they shop for products on the Internet and then go to a store to purchase them—
because too often the store doesn’t have the product on hand as its website promised. With the
cloud, inventory records will be much more visible and reliable. Connected shoppers, who
browse brick-and-mortar aisles with web browser in hand, are beginning to exercise their
leverage, such as asking the store to match a price found on a competitor’s website. Retailers’
brand value will be dramatically affected by how they satisfy these mobile-savvy shoppers.

Everyone will want to give you advice.

In an age of information overload and unlimited choice, companies in all industries will want to
become your trusted advisor—which is also a key way retailers will fight against
commoditization. “Companies will be less interested in the immediate sale than in providing
advice in order to develop a relationship,” Hagel says. The need for guidance will spawn new
companies that leverage the insights from the many footprints we leave online. Now, for
example, shopping sites might offer suggestions of movies or videos based on previous
purchases. “The next level will be companies that make those suggestions based on not just your
activity on one specific site, but across a range of places—what you watch on web TV, on
YouTube and other sites,” Hagel says. “If a company can capture all my online activity, as it
occurs in real time, it can have an integrated view of me as an individual and suggest things I
didn’t even know I wanted to look at.”

You will be sold to differently.

Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Business Unit of Red Hat, the
open source technology solutions provider, says the cloud is fundamentally changing the way
companies sell to businesses and consumers. “The old mantra used to be people buy from
people,” he says. “But customers are moving to more online transactions, which is fundamentally
a cloud phenomenon. Even in industries where the transaction requires direct personal

3
interaction, buyers will form their opinions of products and services based on input from online
communities.” The cloud will “give small, niche retailers the ability to tweak their offerings and
develop a closer understanding of their customers,” notes Crenshaw. In addition, he expects
companies to lure customers with new kinds of “freemiums”—free online versions of their
wares. The idea is that a portion of customers taking advantage of free versions will eventually
shift to paid versions with more features.

You’ll be able to make smarter decisions.

Having just-in-time training won’t be the only way the cloud will help you make wiser choices.
Burrus points out the cloud can turn any mobile device into a “supercomputer.” This means you
can access processing power as needed from the cloud to analyze virtually any type of
information wherever you are. Imagine, for example, that you combined live stock market data,
weather projections, scanned news stories, tweets and comments in blogs, gauging the sentiment
or subtle changes in public opinions. Put those streams of information together, feed them into an
advanced simulation on your mobile phone and you could gain unique insight that leads to
profitable stock choices. Even if you don’t play the market, processing power on demand will
make it easier for you to do original research on any topic that comes to mind, such as combining
sales projections with just-in-time raw material inventories to make sure your department meets
customer demands.

Small businesses will go global…in days.

To satisfy the new markets being created by the cloud, small- and medium-size companies will
leverage the cloud and get a bigger slice of the action. “Small- and medium-size businesses will
go from being constrained to certain geographies due to budget limitations to having the ability
to scale globally with significantly reduced overhead costs,” says David Dobson, an executive
vice president at CA Technologies, a maker of IT management software and solutions that
enables the cloud for SMBs through its managed service provider customers. “Perhaps the most
fascinating part is all of this can happen without building a physical data center at a new location.
For example, instead of deploying on-site infrastructure to run their operations, companies can
access infrastructure as a service, via managed service providers.” And they’ll be able to do it in
days, rather than the months this often took in the past, giving them a huge advantage over
slower competitors, and allowing them to keep pace with larger companies.

Road trips will be less stressful.

If you’ve ever caravanned with a group of cars, you know the pressure of constantly looking in
your rear-view mirror to make sure everyone is keeping up. Leave it to a group of college
students to figure out how cloud computing could improve the road trip. As part of a class
project, some University of Michigan students developed a mobile app that uses cloud
computing to allow a cluster of vehicles traveling together to track each other during the journey.
The app lets travelers view vehicle telemetry about their speed and fuel usage; send alerts about
stops along the way; notify fellow caravanners by texting road condition and hazards; and select
the best route. The combination of location tracking, social media and cloud-based analytics
could improve all types of transportation scenarios.

4
Laptop security breaches will decline.

One study found that some 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S.
airports, subjecting companies to embarrassment and financial risk if important information is
exposed. “In the traditional model, people can carry a laptop with all their secrets, like customer
and payroll information,” says Greg Bell, practice leader for information protection at KPMG,
LLP, the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm. “To protect that information, we encrypt it. But there
is a fear that many countries restrict the importation of encrypted laptops, so we run the risk of
breaking local country laws and having the laptop subjected to review which might disclose that
information.” The cloud can eliminate those concerns by having all data securely stored on the
Internet. The laptop no longer stores the data; rather, it becomes the instrument by which to
access it.

“Bedside manner” will become app-infused.

Over the past year, the number of medical students who said they turned to the Internet for
information dropped from 52 percent to 33 percent, while those who cited “mobile” as their
preferred information source zoomed from 19 percent to 34 percent. The desire for info-on-the-
go dovetails with the growth of mobile dashboard applications, which are becoming a red-hot
niche with the many new touchscreen smartphones hitting the market. “Imagine a doctor or
dentist who is able to pull up a patient’s radiograph and zoom into particular areas of the
radiograph with the touch of a button,” says Dan Shey, practice director, Enterprise for ABI
Research, a technology research company. This development would harness the cloud’s
computational ability to render the image so it could be viewed on a mobile device with the
touch, zoom and screen resolution of the device itself. This would allow medical practitioners to
make medical decisions almost instantaneously, regardless of their location or whether they have
access to a desktop computer. It is just one example of how the cloud can overcome the
processing power and data storage limitations of mobile devices.

Public/private clouds will make homes healthier.

Honorio J. Padrón III, a principal and global practice leader at the Hackett Group, a global
consulting firm, sees great opportunities in the convergence of the enterprise and consumer
clouds. Consider the burgeoning area of home health monitoring. The cloud allows doctors to
wirelessly monitor patients with sleep apnea, collect information and then tap into a network of
experts to devise a treatment plan. At a recent trade show, experimental technology was
showcased that uses an infrared camera mounted above the bathroom mirror to take a daily photo
of a person’s face. Over time, the images can be stored and analyzed for changes, alerting
doctors of pre-cancerous skin cells so treatment can begin earlier.

Developing countries will become new markets and new competitors.

Bell notes that China and other emerging countries have not developed robust IT infrastructures,
which means they can embrace the cloud quicker — and exploit new opportunities faster—since
they won’t be as delayed by tasks like integrating legacy technology. At the same time, the cloud
will provide new opportunities in these emerging countries. In India, for example, far more

5
people use cell phones than landlines. As the cloud eliminates barriers to what mobile devices
can do, the devices will become the conduit to open up huge new markets.

Companies will use more suppliers.

The desire for greater efficiency has dictated that companies should streamline the number of
suppliers they use. The cloud could reverse that by allowing companies to coordinate a more
diversified group of suppliers, giving these companies the flexibility to meet unanticipated needs.
The secret is “community clouds”—an embryonic type of cloud computing that allows business
partners to coordinate their activities over a secure platform (which protects their secrets even
from each other). One community cloud, for example, supports employees with complicated
travel itineraries, coordinating the changes to hotel bookings and restaurant reservations if, say, a
flight is cancelled.

Everyone will bootstrap.

The cloud offers individuals exciting ways to collaborate, develop products and test ideas rapidly
and cheaply, which could accelerate the rising rate of entrepreneurialism. “You see small
startups using the cloud to do complex modeling of new product offers,” Hagel says. “The speed
at which you can identify what people are interested in, and what they will pay, really changes
the nature of innovation.”

Language barriers will fade.

“Today, cloud computing gives mobile-device users a level of speech recognition accuracy that
is virtually on par with call center-based transcription services,” says Marcello Typrin, vice
president of product development for Yap, a company that makes a free iPhone application that
converts voicemail messages into text. The cloud’s massive computational power may make
language barriers fade in other ways as well. Imagine you were at a client site and needed to
confer with a colleague in another country who speaks only Italian. You contact him on your
mobile device and both your words are instantly translated into each other’s language using
voice recognition and translation software. “The scenario is possible today with latency near
real-time, assuming you have a network with capable bandwidth on each end,” Typrin says.

Driving factors towards Cloud:

Cloud computing allows computer users to conveniently rent access to fully featured
applications, to software development and deployment environments, and to computing
infrastructure assets such as network-accessible data storage and processing. When considering
the move to cloud computing, organizations should evaluate the different technologies and
configurations, and determine the specific parts of the cloud computing spectrum that meet their
needs. The factors to be considered include:

6
Deployment Models. Depending on the kind of cloud deployment, the cloud may have limited
private computing resources, or may have access to large quantities of remotely accessed
resources. The following deployment models present a number of trade-offs in how customers
can control their resources, and the scale, cost, and availability of resources.

• Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be anaged
by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a
specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and
compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may
exist on premise or off premise.

• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large
industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private,
community, or public) that remain unique entities but that are bound together by standardized or
proprietary technology enabling data and application portability.

• On-site private cloud. The security perimeter for this deployment model extends around both
the subscriber's on-site resources and the private cloud's resources. The private cloud may be
centralized at a single subscriber site or may be distributed over several subscriber sites. The
subscriber implements the security perimeter, which will not guarantee control over the private
cloud's resources, but will enable the subscriber to exercise control over resources entrusted to
the on-site private cloud.

Service Models. The following service models have different strengths and are suitable for
different customers and business objectives. In general, interoperability and portability of
customer workloads are more achievable in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service model
because the building blocks of this service are relatively welldefined.

• Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS). The subscriber uses the provider’s applications running
on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a
thin client interface such as a Web browser. The consumer does not manage or control the
underlying cloud infrastructure, including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or
individual application capabilities. It might be possible for the subscriber to specify application
configuration settings.

• Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). This service allows the subscriber to deploy onto the
cloud infrastructure applications that the subscriber created or acquired using programming
languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the
underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has
control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment
configurations.

7
• Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This service enables the subscriber to use
processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources, and to deploy and
run other software, including operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage
or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage,
deployed applications, and possibly limited control of select networking components, such as
host firewalls.

Comparing Grid Computing with Cloud Computing

Viewed in a broad sense, the concepts of grid and cloud computing seems to have similar
features. This section puts light to differentiate in different perspectives and give an end-to-end
comparison. It could be understood easily when represented in a tabular form as given in table.

Parameter Grid computing Cloud computing

Goal Collaborative sharing of resources Use of service (eliminates the detail)
Computational focuses Computationally intensive Standard and high-level instances
Operations
Workflow management In one physical node In EC2 instance (Amazon EC2+S3)
Level of abstraction Low (more details) High (eliminate details)
Degree of scalability Normal High
Multitask Yes Yes
Transparency Low High
Time to run Not real-time Real-time services
Requests type Few but large allocation Lots of small allocation
Allocation unit Job or task (small) All shapes and sizes (wide &
narrow)
Virtualization Not a commodity Vital
Portal accessible Via a DNS system Only using IP (no DNS registered)
Transmission Suffered from internet delays Was significantly fast
Security Low (grid certificate service) High (Virtualization)
Infrastructure Low level command High level services (SaaS)
Operating System Any standard OS A hypervisor (VM) on which
multiple OSs run
Ownership Multiple Single
Interconnection network Mostly internet with latency and low Dedicated, high-end with low
Bandwidth latency and high bandwidth
Discovery Centralized indexing and Membership services
decentralized info services
Service negotiation SLA based SLA based
User management Decentralized and also Virtual Centralized or can be delegated to
Organization (VO)-based third party
Resource management Distributed Centralized/Distributed
Allocation/Scheduling Decentralized Both centralized/decentralized
Interoperability Open grid forum standards Web Services (SOAP and REST)
Failure management Limited (often failed Strong (VMs can be easily migrated
tasks/applications are restarted) from one node to other)

Pricing of services Dominated by public good or Utility pricing, discounted for larger
privately assigned customers

8
 User friendly Low High
Type of service CPU, network, memory, bandwidth, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS,
device, storage,… Everything as a service
Data intensive storage Suited for that Not suited for that
Example of real world SETI, BOINC, Folding@home, Amazon Web Service (AWS),
GIMPS Google apps
Response Time Can’t be serviced at a time and need Real-time
to be scheduled
Critical object Computer resource Service
Number of users Few More
Resource Limited (because hardware are Unlimited
limited)
Configuration Difficult as users haven’t Very easy to configure
administrator privilege
Future Cloud computing Next generation of internet

Workload Patterns for Cloud

After analyzing the applications and workload, IT organizations of SMEs need to determine
which deployment model best suits their Cloud strategy.

Without going into the definition here of what the difference is between private, public, hybrid,
and community Cloud deployment models [6], a few fundamental considerations follow for the
SME.

9
 Fig Workload Patterns

Private

The option of deploying workloads onto private Clouds becomes attractive when security and
privacy is of concern. A private Cloud provides maximum control as IT organizations can host
data and applications on dedicated hardware. Besides using dedicated hardware (as opposed to
public Clouds where data and applications are hosted on shared environments), IT organizations
can maintain their own operations. Economy-of-scale doesn’t apply to the same extent as with
public Clouds which will most likely be reflected in higher workload costs. Nevertheless, private
Cloud deployments should give IT organizations the same characteristics as public Clouds do;
namely, elastic services that are highly scalable, through a pay-per-use and as-needed business
model.

It is important to note that the use of private Clouds does not imply that SMEs need to invest in
additional hardware and software in-house. This is quite the contrary; instead collaborate and
negotiate with Cloud service providers (who already have the data centers) to ensure that the
necessary Cloud environments are private to your organization with single versus multi-tenancy
as appropriate. This can be enabled through the use of virtual private Clouds; for instance, where
providers allow provisioning of isolated sections of their Cloud data centers including networks
for your use. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including

10
selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and
network gateways.

Public

Workloads that are of a temporary nature are prime candidates to be deployed onto public
Clouds. Public Clouds offer the elasticity and the illusion of infinite capacity that IT
organizations look for. Besides that, public Clouds take advantage of economies-of-scale,
meaning that service providers of public Clouds host workloads from countless IT organizations
and therefore can offer attractive pricing. Furthermore, IT organizations of SMEs that are
looking for ways to deploy workloads without making investments in IT assets, find public
Cloud offerings appealing. Deploying workloads onto the public Cloud means IT organizations
shift those particular workloads from CapEx (Capital Expenditures) to OpEx (Operational
Expenditures).

Hybrid

The hybrid Cloud deployment model is another option IT organizations need to consider, as this
model allows IT organizations to mix and match private, public, and traditional IT assets.
Workloads that have a sensitive data component but need lots of processing power are good
candidates for hybrid Cloud deployment. For example, IT organizations of SMEs may hesitate to
push Business Intelligence (BI)-related data out onto the public Cloud. At the same time, it is the
BI environment that typically uses lots of processing power. The hybrid model allows for having
the data within the SME’s data center while utilizing processing power from the Cloud. As stated
earlier, IT organizations of SMEs have to be prepared to run some of their IT stack in-house
while other IT capabilities are being provisioned from various service providers. The hybrid
Cloud deployment model is probably the most realistic one as SMEs can take advantage of
Cloud services while still making use of investments that were made in internal IT assets.

Community

Workloads that share identical concerns across multiple companies – for example, security
requirements or compliance considerations – are ideal for community Clouds. Community
Clouds offer services that address specific requirements that IT organizations of SMEs may
have. For example, SMEs in the travel and hospitality industry find similarities in their IT
requirements; namely widely distributed booking systems. In this case, SMEs may decide to
either take advantage of an already existing community Cloud service and/or define the specifics
that such a service has to offer and that a community Cloud provider can implement and offer
back to the travel and hospitality industry.

Application Workload Specifics

When looking at application workloads, several dimensions have to be considered. Are

applications supporting seasonal businesses such as retail, ski, and snowboarding instruction
schools, boat rentals, or travel hospitality? These SMEs are most likely to have high variability
when it comes to their computing needs. The same is true for computing needs that are of a

11
temporary nature, such as capacity needed for specific projects, User Acceptance Testing (UAT),
or during mergers and acquisitions. Additional dimensions to consider are:

 Legacy applications: Most likely very difficult to move to the Cloud, especially public
Clouds. Legacy applications have a tendency to have specific requirements; requirements
that are not compliant with the Cloud specifications.
 Standard front and back-office applications: Compared to legacy applications this is
definitely the application stack that needs to be further assessed. The chances are much
better that standard applications can fulfill the Cloud specifications required by the
service providers.
 Batch or online workloads: The pattern of batch versus online workloads needs to be
carefully assessed. Batch workloads may require a lot of memory and storage capacity
versus online workloads which may require more computing and network power. Again,
these are different workloads and it is important to understand which workload is
appropriate to be moved to the Cloud.
 Workload frequency: This is similar to what was discussed above regarding supporting
seasonal businesses; however, here it is more about supporting, for example, month-end
business processes and the like.
 Workload cost: When putting together the business case for moving applications to the
Cloud it is important to understand what the baseline is. In other words, how much does
the analyzed workload cost today (factor in hardware, software, operating, etc.)? This
influences the selection of Cloud service providers when it comes to crunching numbers.

Big Data on Cloud

Cloud computing has become a viable, mainstream solution for data processing, storage and
distribution, but moving large amounts of data in and out of the cloud presented an
insurmountable challenge for organizations with terabytes of digital content. A pioneer in the
enablement of high-speed data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, Aspera has now
unlocked the cloud for big data with its industry-leading high-speed transport solutions.

The Cloud Promise

Cloud computing promises on demand, scalable, pay-as-you-go compute and storage capacity.
Compared to an in-house datacenter, the cloud eliminates large upfront IT investments, lets
businesses easily scale out infrastructure, while paying only for the capacity they use. It's no
wonder cloud adoption is accelerating – the amount of data stored in Amazon Web Services
(AWS) S3 cloud storage has jumped from 262 billion objects in 2010 to over 1 trillion objects at
the end of the first second of 2012.

Cloud computing holds a tremendous promise of unlimited, on demand, elastic, computing and
data storage resources, without the large upfront investments required when deploying traditional
data centers. The cloud eliminates the risk of upfront IT investments and allows businesses to
scale out and back by quickly adding or removing resources while paying only for the capacity
they use.

12
From a business perspective, the cloud offers three key advantages:

 Removing computing/storage infrastructure as a limiting factor in meeting un-anticipated

demand.
 Eliminating the need to build IT infrastructures that can handle spikes in activity only to
sit idle most of the time.
 Reducing the risk of upfront investment and improving cash flow through pay- as-you-go
models, charging only for the resources that are actually used.

The Big Data Challenge

Traditional WAN-based transport methods cannot move terabytes of data at the speed dictated
by businesses; they use a fraction of available bandwidth and achieve transfer speeds that are
unsuitable for such volumes, introducing unacceptable delays in moving data into, out of, and
within the cloud.

Cloud adoption by big data businesses has been limited because of the problem of moving their
data into and out of the cloud. Often dealing with data sets measuring in tens of terabytes, they
have had to rely on traditional means for moving big data:

 Ship hard disk drives to a cloud provider and hope that they don’t get delayed, damaged
or lost.
 Attempt to transfer the data via the web, using TCP-based transfer methods such as FTP
or HTTP.

Neither option is practical and both impose costs on the business through delayed access to data,
risks of loss or damage, and the need to invest resources into maintaining an infrastructure that
can support it – either shipping operations or over-engineered IT systems.

Big Data Solution

Built on top of our patented fasp™ transport technology, Aspera’s suite of On Demand Transfer
Products solves both technical problems of the WAN and the cloud I/O bottleneck, delivering
unrivaled performance for the transfer of large files, or large collections of files, in and out of the
cloud.

 Transfers occur at line speed, optimizing the intra-cloud data transfer, delivering
consistently high speeds along the entire data path.
 Files of any size and any format can be transferred at any distance, over any network,
under any condition.
 Transfer capacity can easily scale-out and back, on demand.
 Offers full support for all Aspera software and use cases.

13
 Users have extraordinary control over individual transfer rates and bandwidth sharing, as well as
full visibility into bandwidth utilization. File transfer times can be guaranteed, regardless of the
network distance and conditions, including transfers over satellite, wireless, and unreliable long-
distance international links. Complete security is built-in, including secure endpoint
authentication, on-the-fly data encryption, and integrity verification.

For users of Amazon's S3 cloud storage, Aspera has developed a high-speed software bridge,
Direct-to-S3, which transfers data at line speed, from source directly into AWS S3, with no hops
or stops in between:

 Enables direct I/O in and out of Amazon S3 storage.

 Ensures intra-cloud I/O keeps up with the fasp™-based transport over the WAN.
 Transparently handles cloud-specific I/O requirements such as S3 multi-part uploads.

IT as a service

(ITaaS) is an operational model where the IT organization of an enterprise is run much like
business, acting and operating as a distinct business entity creating Product (including services)
for the other Line of Business (LOB) organizations within the enterprise. At its core, ITaaS is a
competitive business model where an enterprise IT organization views the LOBs as having many
options for IT services and the IT organization has to compete against those other options in
order to be the provider to the needs of the LOBs. Options for providers other than the internal
IT organization may include outsourcing companies and public cloud providers.

Under an ITaaS model, the internal IT organization of an enterprise will have a business-centric
focus. It will place great emphasis on the needs and the outcomes required by the LOBs. The
benefits to the enterprise sought by using the ITaaS model include the standardization and
simplification of products delivered by IT, improved financial transparency and more direct
association of costs to consumption, and increased IT operational efficiency resulting from the
need to compare the price of internally produced products to those available from external
providers. The transformation of an internal IT organization from operating as a cost-center to an
ITaaS model is also believed to produce improved levels of business agility for the enterprise as
a whole.

IT aaS is not a cloud service model

According to The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing there are three service models
associated with cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The concept of ITaaS as an operating model is not
limited to or dependent on cloud computing. Several proponents of ITaaS as an operating model
will insist that the ability for an IT organization to deliver ITaaS is enabled by underlying
technology models such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Vendors who are proponents of the concept of
ITaaS as an operating model include EMC, Citrix and VMware

ITaaS is not a technology shift - such as a move to increase the use of virtualization. Rather, it is
an operational and organizational shift to running IT like a business and optimizing IT

14
production for business consumption. IT organizations that adopt ITaaS are most likely to use
the best practices for IT service management as defined in the Information Technology
Infrastructure Library. Characteristics of IT organizations adopting ITaaS models would include:

 They apply the principles of Value Creation, managing Service Assets, and applying
Service Structures within the context of their Service Strategy.
 Financial Management, Return on Investment, and Demand Management are all critical
aspects of their Service Portfolio Management process.
 They utilize a Service Lifecycle to design, transition, operate, and continually improve
their products from initial idea inception throughout the lifecycle until final product
retirement as part of an overall Portfolio of offerings to their market segments and
customers (the enterprise LOBs).

Transformation to IT as a Service
Several vendors who are proponents of ITaaS describe the transition of an IT organization to the
ITaaS model as a journey which includes the adoption of such models as:
New technology models founded on the use of private, public, and hybrid clouds; employing
controls, trust and compliance up and down the stack; introducing infrastructure standardization
and automation wherever possible.

 New consumption models leveraging self-service catalogs offering both internal and
external services; providing IT financial transparency for costs and pricing; offering
consumerized IT – such as bring your own device (BYoD) – to meet the needs of users.
All of which simplify and encourage consumption of services.
 New operational models which imply a revised organization, with new business and
technical skills and roles; creation of more horizontal, service-oriented processes; explicit
IT alignment with lines-of-business.
 Business driven IT solution is represented as a repeatable business activity having a
specified outcome, wherein service acts as a self-contained logical unit, may be
composed of other services (choreography), and is generally a "black box" to its
consumers.

15